Poets & Writers Theater

Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, answers questions about the journal’s mission, slush piles, and her editorial process in this virtual event with Becky Tuch for the Lit Mag News Roundup. An interview with Acker about the Common’s fifteenth anniversary is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Knopf video, John Nathan speaks about his translation process, his personal relationship with Yukio Mishima, and the historical context of Voices of the Fallen Heroes: And Other Stories (Vintage, 2025), a newly published collection of Mishima’s work with an introduction by Nathan, edited by Stephen Dodd.

In this conversation hosted by the Korea Society, authors Gina Chung and Yun Ko-eun discuss the many possibilities of the short story form, the defining characteristics of their respective authorial voices, and the differences between writing and reading stories in English and Korean.

Author and journalist Jessie Tu talks about her experience and expectations for writing her second novel, The Honeyeaters (Allen & Unwin, 2024), and the “colonial and imperialist legacies” around language in a conversation with Annabel Crabb at this Roaring Stories Bookshop event in Sydney, Australia.

In this Waterstones interview, Asako Yuzuki discusses the process of writing and publishing her novel Butter (4th Estate, 2024), translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, and shares her thoughts on the book’s themes of food and desire. Yuzuki’s novel was selected as the Waterstones Book of the Year for 2024.

In this Center for Fiction event, author Mariana Enriquez talks about the supernatural themes and local Argentinian language and humor within her short story collection A Sunny Place for Shady People (Hogarth, 2024) with translator Megan McDowell in a conversation moderated by Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

In this Brooklyn Book Festival virtual event, authors Hisham Matar, Rania Mamoun, and Omar Khalifah talk about the purpose and urgency of writing about history during times of crisis in a conversation moderated by writer and translator Yasmin Seale. Khalifah’s novel, Sand-Catcher (Coffee House Press, 2024), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally found my way back to the womb.” In this event for the Center for the Art of Translation’s annual Day of Translation, cohosted at the Center for Fiction, Don Mee Choi delivers her keynote speech about writing from the “translation womb,” her attempts to comprehend and translate the Korean War, and her definition of what it means to write in the language of translation.

“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.” Anne Carson talks about the artists and philosophers who inspire her to create and think, and how boxing has helped her in the wake of her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in a conversation with Norwegian author Linn Ullmann for this Louisiana Channel event.

In this event presented by Green Apple Books and the Center for the Art of Translation celebrating the launch of Yuri Herrera’s novel Season of the Swamp (Graywolf Press, 2024), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, Herrera and Dillman read from the book and discuss their collaborative approach to translation in a conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

“It was like a very nice, pleasant chat.” In this 2016 Foyles video, Korean author Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith speak about working together on The Vegetarian (Portobello Books, 2015), which won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Kang is the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In this event, authors Hiromi Kawakami and Adam Ehrlich Sachs discuss writing about specific places, fiction’s relationship to personal truth, and their literary inspirations in a conversation with Motoyuki Shibata, translator and founder of the Japanese journal MONKEY New Writing From Japan. Kawakami’s new novel, Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Soft Skull Press, 2024), ), translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this installment of the Visions of America: All Stories, All People, All Places series hosted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and PBS Books, Kaoukab Chebaro, head of Global Studies at the Columbia University Libraries, discusses the importance of first-person storytelling and her work in preserving the individual history of Arabs across the globe.

Poet, translator, and editor Urayoán Noel reads two poems from the Letras Latinas Oral History Project, an archive that began in 2005, in this Poets House video. For more about Letras Latinas, read this Q&A with director Francisco Aragón in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Louisiana Channel video, Russian poet and journalist Maria Stepanova offers her advice for young writers to look forward to something unknown and to be able to “look into the future with some degree of hope.”

“On the wall of the room there was a mirror / reflecting back a comical skull that was laughing at itself.” In this bilingual poetry reading, “Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence” is read in the original Spanish by Homero Aridjis and the English translation is read by George McWhirter. Aridjis and McWhirter won the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize for the collection of the same name, published by New Directions.

In this short video about the novel Kairos (Granta Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, German author Jenny Erpenbeck speaks about the universality of themes of hope, decay, and disappointment in the story and translator Michael Hoffmann talks about maintaining the spirit of the text through translation.

In this video, South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon reads with her longtime translator Don Mee Choi, both sharing their work and speaking about their writing and collaboration with Susan Bernofsky, director of Literary Translation at Columbia University. Choi’s latest poetry collection, Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Watch the trailer for the television series adaptation of Liu Cixin’s acclaimed science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books in 2014. Created by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo and starring Jovan Adepo, Rosalind Chao, Jess Hong, and Benedict Wong, the Netflix series follows the life of an astrophysicist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and her encounters with extraterrestrial life.

In this 2023 London Review of Books event, Emily Wilson reads from and discusses her translation of The Iliad by Homer, published in September by Norton, and how she wishes to present Homer to a new generation in a conversation with classicist and historian Edith Hall. Passages from Wilson’s translation are also read by actors Tobias Menzies and Juliet Stevenson.